the.com/axon
the body's longest cable, firing electrical gossip faster than you can flinch
means The long, slender projection of a nerve cell that carries electrical impulses away from the cell body toward other neurons, muscles, or glands.
from From Greek 'axōn,' meaning 'axis' — the same root behind the imaginary line a thing spins around. The 19th-century anatomists who named it saw the nerve fiber as the cell's central axis, the spine of the neuron along which signals travel. It's a distant cousin of Latin 'axis,' both reaching back to a Proto-Indo-European root for the pivot of a wheel.
- insane length
- Some run a meter, single cell, head to toe
- speed demon
- Signals travel up to 120 meters per second
- myelin armor
- Fatty wrap boosts speed like cable insulation
- giant squid
- Their thick axons launched modern neuroscience
- one direction
- Strictly outbound, the neuron's transmit antenna
for instance
squid giant axon — loligo squid axon, 1mm diameter, used in hodgkin-huxley experiments establishing action potentials (1952)